


A New York Times T Magazine Exclusive: America's Darling Tells All

by StrawberryLane



Series: A Timeline Reconstructed: Lady Luck and Mister Barnes [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky is only mentioned, F/M, Female Steve Rogers, Interviews, New York Times, News Media, Press and Tabloids, Publicity, magazine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-01
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2018-08-28 11:54:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8444836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrawberryLane/pseuds/StrawberryLane
Summary: When I finally arrive at Minetta Tavern, a restaurant established in the 1930’s, currently sat on 113 Macdougal Street, Lady Luck is waiting for me. She’s at a table in the back, drinking a cup of tea so strong the spoon is standing straight up. “Peggy introduced me to it,” Lady Luck says as she shakes my hand, “And now I can’t drink it any other way.”—̶ Excerpt from a New York Times T Magazine Exclusive with Lady Luck, during which Amber Bruckhardt gets the scoop of a lifetime.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Credits to google for the images and to coldwinterrose for the idea!

I’m supposed to meet with and interview Lady Luck over lunch this fine autumn day in October. I’m running slightly late, something I tell Lady Luck’s publicist during a somewhat panicked phone call. It’s panicked on my part, the publicist assures me that Lady Luck has no problem waiting for me and my late subway train. I hope it’s true, I would hate to make a bad first impression when I am meeting a national icon.

When I finally arrive at Minetta Tavern, a restaurant established in the 1930’s, currently sat on 113 Macdougal Street, Lady Luck is waiting for me. She’s at a table in the back, drinking a cup of tea so strong the spoon is standing straight up.

“Peggy introduced me to it,” Lady Luck says as she shakes my hand, “And now I can’t drink it any other way.”

Peggy would be Margaret “Peggy” Carter, Lady Luck’s right hand woman during the second world war and founder of The Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Divison (better known as SHIELD), a US based extra-governmental military counter-terrorism and intelligence agency, though they do work all over the world. It’s where Lady Luck’s fellow Avengers, Black Widow and Hawkeye, are thought to be employed.

We make small talk as we look over the menus. I apologize once again for being late and Lady Luck “Call me Steph,” reassures me that there’s no harm done. “I like watching people,” she tells me, nodding around the restaurant, “I used to draw. Haven’t done it much lately, but when I did, I could sit for hours just staring at people to memorize every last detail of them so I could draw it later.”

When our waitress comes by I can’t help but notice that Lady Luck orders the cheapest option for everything. I tell her as much and hope I’m not being too rude. She laughs and assures me I’m not. It’s just, she says, that she’s still in the mindset of having to spend the money she does have sparingly, even though she has a lot more than she used to.

“Besides, this place have gotten a lot more expensive then when I was last here,” Lady Luck says as she puts down the menu.

“You have been here before?”

“Yes, once. With my husband, a couple of years after it first opened. We wanted to do something unusual for our anniversary, and we weren’t exactly the type of people who regularly went out to eat.”

Lady Luck was married?

The waitress arrives with our orders; Mine is the Minetta burger, with cheddar and caramelized onion. Lady Luck’s is the Pasta Za Za. with pancetta, sage, Parmesan, and a fried egg. Both look heavenly.

“Yes, I was married. For over eight years,” Lady Luck says, returning to my earlier question. She frowning now, making me think I’ve done something wrong. I ask as much and she, again, assures me that I haven’t. There’s a lot of assuring and reassuring going on today.

“I haven’t been completely honest with you, or with America,” she says, and sits up straighter, her eyes serious. I am ready to write down whatever it is she will tell me, something tells me it will be important. 

_“My name is Stephanie Barnes and I didn’t always look like this."_

Did I just hear that right?

“It’s true. During the war, shortly after Bucky shipped out, I began volunteering at a hospital, as much as my faulty immune system would allow me. That’s where I met Abraham Erskine, a German scientist. He had created a serum which would produce supersoldiers, a species of their own, if you will, whose existence would ensure the allies victory in the war. He told me he was looking for the kindest and most noble man on earth, because the serum amplifies qualities that already exist inside of you. I asked him, mostly as a joke, if he had considered looking among women too. He asked if I wanted to try, he had no guarantees it would actually work, or even if I was going to survive. I said yes, and here we are. And before you ask, No, there are no other supersoldiers, because Dr Erskine was murdered before even leaving the room where my experiment took place. By a Hydra spy among our midst.”

I tell Lady Luck I need a minute, because this is some heavy information. She did ask me to call her Steph earlier, but I would never have seen this coming. Lady Luck and Stephanie Barnes are one and the same; my mind is blown. This was not what I was expecting to come out of Lady Luck's mouth.

I ask her if this is some sort of prank, if there’s a camera filming all of this that I’m not aware of. She tells me “No, it’s the truth,” and asks the waitress to get me some water.

“Did your husband know?” I ask when I’ve got my wits about me once again. The story of how Lady Luck met and began an affair with the married James Barnes is perhaps the most famous story to come out of the war —̶ at least on American soil. But if James Barnes was married to Stephanie Barnes, who secretly was Lady Luck the whole time? That would mean we would have to rewrite a big chunk of the American war history.

“He did. Well, not at first, because I wasn’t allowed to tell him. Poor man thought I had died back home when he didn’t get any letters. They wouldn’t allow me to write to him for months, you see, because they thought I wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret. But he found out at Azzano, when I rescued him from the prison camp. Boy, was he mad. But relived too. You know, he’d been tortured and was pretty out of it when I found him, but the first question out of his mouth was if my transformation had hurt.”

Lady Luck is here with me in physical form, but her mind is far far away in the past. But to her, I guess, it wasn’t years ago, only months. Sleeping in the ice probably isn’t something you remember.

“He never cared about himself. Not when there was someone else around that he could care about instead,” she let’s out a laugh and I ask if she misses him. “Oh, every day. There’s not a day that go by when I don’t think about him.”

“What did he think about it? Your transformation, you being out there, fighting in the war?”

“He never said anything negative about my transformation, only told me he liked me however I looked, it wasn’t my body he fell in love with, it was my personality, and that hadn’t changed. As for the war, we had a couple of fights about it, but I think he knew deep down that there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He wasn’t the only one making a fuss, though. You have to remember, I wasn’t just a chorus girl, I was a woman as well. I had no place on the battle field in the first place, supersoldier or not. But I had made up my mind. I’m very stubborn,” she grins, taking a bite of her pasta dish. She motions for me to eat my burger too. “You need something after all of the bombs I’ve dropped on you during the last hour.”

Our time is almost up, Lady Luck has to be elsewhere soon. While we scarf down our respective lunches, I tell her this interview was supposed to be about the Chituari, what’s next for the Avengers, and a small game; her having to choose between different things like cinema or television, chips or popcorn, that kind of thing.

She laughs (she laughs a lot more than I thought she would) and tells me we can still do that. She’d rather watch television (“Or Netflix, Clint’s been showing me all his favorite movies”) and will choose chips over popcorn if given the choice. "I'm more than fine with either."

We say goodbye as we step outside the restaurant. I’m aiming for the subway, back to the office, Lady Luck is aiming for her bike. I stand back and watch as she disappears off in the opposite direction, blonde hair blowing in the wind. It occurs to me that I probably didn’t even get to meet Lady Luck today. Instead, I met Stephanie Barnes. And for that I am glad.

 

 


End file.
